Added a couple of feeds to the planet: Roger Pielke Sr. and David Appell. David’s back in fine form, and I keep forgetting to read Roger’s blog and then kicking myself when I finally get to it because I’ve missed something interesting days earlier.
A Really Convenient Truth
From Andy Borowitz:
In an attempt to counteract the impact of former Vice President Al Gore’s cautionary film about global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Vice President Dick Cheney is starring in a new film advocating global warming, Mr. Cheney confirmed today.
The Cheney film, entitled “A Really Convenient Truth,” will open in theaters nationwide in time for the fall 2006 midterm elections.
“I saw the Al Gore movie, and quite frankly, the whole thing was a downer from the word go,” Mr. Cheney said at a White House press briefing. “I thought it was time to tell the American people the good news about global warming.”
(Hat tip Benny Peiser.)
News of the Warm*
David Parker has published a new, more detailed analysis in the latest Journal of Climate arguing that the urban heat island effect is not responsible for the measured global warming trend. As in his earlier work on this, Parker compared windy to non-windy days:
The trends in temperature are almost unaffected by this subsampling, indicating that urban development and other local or instrumental influences have contributed little overall to the observed warming trends.
(Roger Pielke Sr. has thoughtfully disagreed with Parker on this question in the past, so I look forward to his comments on the new Journal of Climate paper.)
* With a respectful tip of the Le Blog chapeau to Harry Shearer, who has added a new “News of the Warm” feature to his weekly radio show.
On Hockey Sticks and Glaciers
The news media coverage last week of the NRC “hockey stick” report provides a stark reminder of the point Dan Sarewitz made in his How science makes environmental controversies worse. While everyone prattled on about whether the hockey stick is now really broken, or the handle has been properly taped back together, or whatever, last week’s paper in Science about warming-induced threats to Andean water supplies seems to have been completely ignored by the news media (at least the English-language news media).
One, the hockey stick, seems to have essentially no effect on the decisions we might make about climate policy, but got huge attention. It’s the high ground that everyone in the scientized debate is trying to win. The other is of profound importance, has real policy relevance, and seems to have been ignored.
Noxious Miasmatic Effluvia
Today’s word of the day is febrifacient: a thing that produces fever. In his 1845 “Emigrants Guide to Oregon and California”, Lansford Hastings noted the obvious of the Great Basin and Rocky Mountain Region: it doesn’t rain much here, while in the winter “snow falls very frequently, though not to a great depth.” Sounds like a bad place to live, but not to worry! In the classic enthusiasm of westward expansion, Hastings found the silver lining: in the desert there are no swamps!
There are few portions of the world, if any, which are so entirely exempt from all febrifacient causes. There being no low, marshy regions, the noxious miasmatic effluvia, so common in such regions, is here, nowhere found.
Comment Spam
I use the Spam Karma WordPress plugin to protect myself from people trying to boost their Google rankings by leaving comments on my blog. It pretty much runs itself, so I never pay it much attention. So I was astonished when today’s SK Simple Digest Report landed in my inbox. SK has caught 5,214 attemped comment spams in the last 24 hours. That’s a comment spam every 17 seconds.
I wonder if any of those were real comments? Hope not, but if yours aren’t getting through, send me an email.
Wish I’d Thought of That
A friend points to one of the great baseball names, Twins’ rookie picture pitcher Boof Bonser. According to the MLB web site, the former Florida high school star had his name legally changed in 2001 from “John”.
(Thanks to copy editor Malcolm.)
Weather Station
Lissa finished a nice sturdy stand for the cotton region shelter in the backyard. It’s the standard National Weather Service Coop setup. Of course my backyard would be a terrible place for a genuine Coop station – too close to buildings, etc. But this gives me a feel for how the temperatures at our house compare to the official NWS numbers – how big our “urban heat island effect” really is.
Known Unknowns
I don’t know how to tell for sure, but I’ll hazard a guess that this is the first time Donald Rumsfeld has been quoted in the climate literature.
It’s a discussion of the latest version of the Hadley global temperature data set, and the team has gone to significant effort to quantify the uncertainties:
A definitive assessment of uncertainties is impossible, because it is always possible that some unknown error has contaminated the data, and no quantitative allowance can be made for such unknowns. There are, however, several known limitations in the data, and estimates of the likely effects of these limitations can be made.
And then the authors cite Rumsfeld’s famous disquisition on the topic:
There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
A new paper (actually came out last month, so not quite “snap snap” new) by Kostas Andreadis and Dennis Lettenmaier[1] looks at trends in drought severity and duration over the 20th century in the continental U.S. In much of the country, drought is getting less severe, but unfortunately not in the places that matter most – the arid west, where we humans are living closest to the water margins.
My take in this morning’s Journal.
[1] Andreadis, K. M., and D. P. Lettenmaier (2006), Trends in 20th century drought over the continental United States, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L10403, doi:10.1029/2006GL025711.